I don’t think we’ll ever
completely separate ourselves from postmodernist notions. After all, some
postmodernist ideas have been percolating around in discourses of consciousness
and meaning-making processes at least since Dante’s 13th-century Letter
to Cangrande della Scalla in which the author (presumably Dante) discusses
the fact that his work is polysemous. He expounds upon that notion and
discusses four types of meanings which result in multiple strategies for
interpreting texts.
Further, if postmodernist
expanded the notion of “text” to include signs, natural phenomena, and more,
well, we’ve had that in our consciousness ever since early Babylonian
astrologers. In terms of creating patterns and developing codes / numerical
strategies for text interpretations, we’ve certainly had that since Jewish gematria,
and then also Kabbalistic practices.
This is not the place to
develop a genealogy of postmodernist thoughts. I would love to do so, but I don’t
want to deviate from the central idea, which is to say that for the last 10 or
20 years, theorists of all sorts have been attempting to declare postmodernism
has declared officially “over” – and have proposed a wide array of alternative
theories, many of which have to do with culture, technology, gender, and
ethics.
There are aspects of
postmodernist thought that I find very useful and I would not want to give them
up. For example, I don’t want to give up some of the more interesting notions
of reality and reality construction.
Perhaps it’s not
productive to say that the world is completely an illusion, but it’s fun to
think so. I also like the social constructivist ideas, especially when
connected with power. For example, I have to say that I agree when Foucault and
Baudrillard suggests prisons exist not only to enforce behavioral norms, but
also to delude us into thinking that there is a “free” world and that “freedom”
is an absolute, when in reality, there are all kinds of constraints to our freedom,
beginning with language itself, and ending in behaviors, beliefs, and values
that may be, in essence, coercive.
I think it is interesting
that many of the new ideas of post-postmodernism have much to do with new
technologies and the impact on identity (digital communities), selfhood
(genetic engineering), privacy (Internet, surveillance, UAVs), communication
(communications technologies), understanding the world (computing, Big Data),
and more.
In fact, once one uses
technology as the primum mobile of consciousness and global
epistemological constructs, it’s easy to see how a next logical step would be a
preferential shift to technocratic social organization, from individual
communication to bodies politic. The implications could pretty scary. Technocracies
are notoriously dehumanizing, especially when combined with command economies
or oligopoly-tending capitalistic economies.
Here are a few recent
ideas:
Pseudo-modernism /
digimodernism: Digital technology can dismantle persistent
postmodern issues such as “existential uncertainty” and “artistic
anti-essentialism.” Kirby argues that the post-postmodern generation reverts to
modernism, at least in the sense that there is a renewed belief in agency and
in individual ability to influence others (by means of technology). See
Kirby (2009) Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern
and Reconfigure our Culture.
Automodernism:
Robert Samuels argues that new technology allow a new level of neutrality to
emerge. At the same time, postmodernist identity “flux” is supplanted by new,
hardened identity politics.
Complexism:
Philip Galanter has created a fusion of technology and the arts; it has been
suggested that he echoes and updates the Russian and Italian Futurists (who
were certainly pro-technology, with the idea that technology helps establish a
coherent New World Order. Some of the enthusiasm died in WWI and in the early
Soviet Union.
Hypermodernism:
Hypermodernism, coined in the 1990s, is a chaotic, high-intensity, fast-paced
world of rapid and always evolving identity and social relationships. The
hypermodern is not characterized by indeterminacy (as would the postmodernist
world), but in quick moments of stasis, followed by discrete, lenticular “pods”
of culture / socioeconomic / socio-political ontology.
Altermodernism: Nicolas
Bourriaud embraces alterity and takes it further, suggesting that the
creolization of our cultures in the global context will create a universal
aesthetic. Multiculturism is worn out. The next stage is the “creole” (which
will probably change, given the colonialist overtones implicit in the word
itself.)
***
References
Alighieri, Dante. Letter
to Can Grande della Scala. Accessed November 13, 2013 http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/cangrande.english.html
Awet (2013). Other
Post-Postmodernisms: A Glossary. Heterodoxia. April 2013. Accessed Nov
15, 2013. http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=896#more-896
Kirby, A. (2009) Digimodernism:
How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture.
London, NY: Continuum Publishers.
